Often patients and physicians discover ailments or diseases too late, making it difficult to treat a patient in time to effect timely therapy. Monitoring body organs regularly and effectively, therefore, can make the difference between saving and losing a life. Even for diseases that have positive prognosis, monitoring the disease over its lifetime can help administer appropriate therapy, including, but not limited to, drugs, electrical stimulation, or other known therapies, at suitable times, study different stages of the disease, and improve the patient's condition.
For example, the etiology of an overactive bladder (OAB) syndrome, which affects approximately 50 million patients worldwide, is still not well understood, and the commonly prescribed non-invasive primary treatment (e.g., drugs) is ineffective for approximately 40% of those patients. For patients that do not react well to drugs, other treatments (such as neural stimulation), or surgery are significantly more effective. But these treatments are not readily prescribed due to the high invasiveness and other adverse effects related with these procedures.
Physicians usually monitor drug effectiveness by conducting urodynamics (a study that assesses how the bladder and urethra perform their job of storing and releasing urine) and monitoring urine urgency and frequency. They are, however, unable to quickly assess whether a drug favorably affects the bladder, and to what extent. For example, it is difficult to discern whether a drug has affected urothelium sensitization, detrusor over-activity, nerve firing, and other such events.
If, over time, favorable results are not observed, patients are typically advised to change the current drug treatments. Because discovering an effective drug treatment takes time, the disease may progress significantly during this period. Further, if drug treatments are ineffective, selective screening may be required before patient undergo more invasive treatments such as neural stimulation.
In addition to these problems, shedding light on the effectiveness of a drug or other OAB therapies earlier in the treatment course enables selection of the most effective treatment without unnecessary delays. As the OAB disease stage varies significantly among patients, monitoring a disease's progression (by monitoring changes in bladder wall pathology and morphology, or presence of indicative biomarkers in urine, for example) may be critical. With such information at hand, the physician can appropriately treat a patient earlier in the course of disease progression.
Presently, physicians are unable to closely monitor patients' progress or their disease stage. In addition, physicians are unable to readily determine the efficacy of certain treatments, such as drug therapies on the patient. In light of these issues, there exists a need for an improved monitoring system that allows physicians to monitor organ activity in real time or near real time.